NYU's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences appointed Wang, 35, to the chair in April, alongside two other professors. The Silver chair is the most prestigious named professorship NYU offers its faculty.
The professorship was endowed through a 2002 bequest from Julius Silver, an attorney and 1922 NYU graduate. It is awarded for research distinction and a commitment to undergraduate teaching, the university says, and is capped at 75 chairs across all faculties.
Wang, born in Guilin in southern China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, entered Peking University in 2007 when she was 16 years old through its School of Earth and Space Sciences, then switched to mathematics, graduating in 2011.
By 2014, she had earned an engineering degree from France's École Polytechnique and a master's from Université Paris-Sud.
She completed her doctorate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2019 under Larry Guth, then spent two years as a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
